If you aren’t signed in, click Go to Drive and sign in with your Google account now. Not only will you be able to copy both text and (usually) images with this method, you’ll also be able to convert the PDF into a document that you can edit in nearly any word processor—even if it was scanned as an image, and even copy protection was enabled by the author.

Google Drive’s OCR software isn’t perfect, and there may be some errors or parts of the text that couldn’t be converted. Now that the document is open in Google Docs, you can edit it here if you’d like. Any changes you make will be saved automatically to new Google Doc file with the same name as the PDF in your Google Drive.

Click the File menu at the top-left corner of Google Docs and select Download. Select Microsoft Word (. docx). You can open and edit this document type in Microsoft Word, Pages for macOS, WordPerfect, LibreOffice, OpenOffice, and nearly any other major word processor. Select a saving location and click Save. You’re done!

If you want to copy in more of a screenshot-type style and paste the copied info as an image, select Rectangular selection instead. If you really need the images, you can also use Google Drive to convert the PDF to a Google Doc—this makes it possible to select and copy images.

If this doesn’t highlight anything, it’s likely that the PDF was scanned as an image and doesn’t contain editable text. It’s also possible the document was copy-protected. See the Google Drive method to learn how to convert it to a format that you can copy from.

If you copied as an image, this will paste the selected area as an image.

If you don’t have Adobe Reader yet, you can download and install it for free.

If Adobe Reader is your default PDF program, just double-click the PDF file that you want to open to open it in Acrobat Reader.

If Adobe Reader is your default PDF program, just double-click the PDF file that you want to open to open it in Acrobat Reader.

If Adobe Reader is your default PDF program, just double-click the PDF file that you want to open to open it in Acrobat Reader.

If Adobe Reader is your default PDF program, just double-click the PDF file that you want to open to open it in Acrobat Reader.

If you want to select the entire PDF (without images) at once, click the Edit menu at the top and click Select All’ instead. If this highlights all of the text without the images, great! If the entire document becomes blue rather than just the text, the document is an image—see the using Google Drive method instead. If you really need the images, you can also use Google Drive to convert the PDF to a Google Doc—this makes it possible to select and copy images.

If you used “Select All” and your PDF is more than one page long, you may have to go back and copy the other pages individually after pasting in this page’s contents.

You can use a text editor like Notepad or TextEdit as well, but the PDF’s formatting won’t be preserved if you do this.

You can use a text editor like Notepad or TextEdit as well, but the PDF’s formatting won’t be preserved if you do this.